Welcome to the chaos

But ye lions do this once cubs each a certain age. A decent amount of birds do it (for example: flamingos and a lot of penguin, duck, and goose species). Gharials (a type of South Asian crocodilian) form creches with hundreds of babies from multiple nests (they lay under 100 eggs each and sometimes as few as 20). Feral hogs tend to form groups of mothers and young like this, and I saw 3 sows and like 15+ tiny babies the other day and they were so cute

But ye that's how you get pictures like these

Lin Beifong, what a woman you are!🔥🔥🔥😮‍💨😮‍💨😮‍💨

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I was doing some writing yesterday and had to stop to illustrate what Lin looked like.

So, unintentionally, I think this counts as a bit of a spoiler for upcoming scenes.

Outside her office, Team Avatar and Tenzin waited. Or rather, most of them waited.

Bolin had his ear pressed so flat against the heavy oak door it looked like he was trying to phase through it. His eyes were wide with a mixture of fear and glee.

“Bolin, get away from there,” Mako hissed, his arms crossed tightly. “That’s the Chief’s private business.”

“It’s hardly dignified, Bolin,” Tenzin added, stroking his beard with a troubled expression.

Bolin waved a dismissive hand behind him, not daring to move his head from its crucial listening post. “Shhh! You’re going to miss the best part.” He straightened up slightly, cupping a hand to the side of his mouth as if holding a radio microphone.

“Greetings, sports fans!” he whispered in his best pro-bending announcer voice. “We’re coming to you live from the Republic City Police Station for a title match of epic proportions! In this corner, the challenger, former Interim Chief Saikhan, who seems to be employing a bold ‘standing there and sweating’ strategy!”

Korra, leaning against the opposite wall, snorted with laughter and gave him an encouraging thumbs-up. Asami, standing beside her, fought a smile. She had more reason than anyone to want to hear this, but she maintained her composure, a quiet satisfaction settling in her eyes.

“A muffled response from Saikhan!” Bolin narrated, pressing his ear back to the wood. “Something about… ‘following official council orders’… a weak jab that Beifong easily parries! And she comes back with a haymaker!”

The muffled, furious rumble from within the office suddenly crescendoed into a few distinct, audible words.

“…A DISGRACE TO THIS UNIFORM!”

Bolin winced theatrically. “Ooh! A direct hit! Beifong lands a devastating blow, citing the illegal curfew and the trumped-up arrests! She’s reminding him that he threw innocent citizens in jail, folks! Including children! And, let’s not forget, three of your favourite future pro-bending champions and their brilliant sponsor!” He winked at Mako and Asami, who just shook his head in exasperation.

“She’s bringing up the power grid shutdown!” Bolin continued, his voice dropping to a dramatic whisper. “A calculated, dirty move by Tarrlok, and Saikhan let it happen! The crowd is going wild!”

“We are not a crowd, Bolin,” Tenzin sighed.

“Chief Beifong is now questioning his ancestry, his tactical abilities, and the structural integrity of his spine! Saikhan is on the ropes! He’s looking for an out, but there’s nowhere to run in the ring of truth!”

Suddenly, a tremendous CRACK-THUDreverberated through the door, rattling the frame.

Instinct took over. In a flash, Mako’s hands were up, fists sputtering into flame. Korra dropped into a low fighting stance, a vortex of air swirling around her. Tenzin snapped into a defensive position in front of Asami, who had already braced herself, eyes scanning the hallway for an attack. The recent past had taught them that any sudden, violent noise could mean only one thing.

“Equalists!” Mako snarled.

“Stay back!” Tenzin commanded.

Bolin, however, hadn’t moved from the door. He slowly turned, a look of profound awe on his face, and held up a hand.

“False alarm, folks! False alarm!” he announced, his voice filled with reverence for the scene he’d just witnessed. “What a move! We’ve just seen a masterful defensive maneuver from Saikhan! Faced with an unstoppable verbal onslaught, he performed a full-body evasive dive behind Chief Beifong’s solid metal desk! The crowd has never seen anything like it!”

The tension in the hallway deflated like a punctured air-ball. Mako extinguished his flames with a frustrated sigh. Korra straightened up, her initial alarm melting into unrestrained glee.

Lin’s voice, now completely unhinged and impossibly louder, erupted again. The words themselves were indistinct, but the raw, unfiltered fury was as clear as crystal. It was the sound of a volcano that had just been told to fill out paperwork.

Bolin listened for another moment, his eyebrows shooting up to his hairline. He turned back to his ‘audience’ with a grave expression.

“Whoa,” he said, his announcer persona returning full-force. “And Chief Beifong… is not taking that display of cowardice well. She is now using some… very colourful language. Language that is, uh, definitely not appropriate for the younger members of our audience. For any folks at home with kids, you might want to cover their ears or perhaps just leave the arena entirely.”

Mako stared at him, his expression utterly deadpan.

“What ‘younger members,’ Bolin?”

In an alternate universe I lost my way in sizzling neon lights. they leave ghosts in my eyes. The soothing burn of whisky. feminine silhouettes cast by burning "open" signs, my mind dies little deaths. they walk in reckless trance. A human lumbering, lurching towards another's flesh The uglier I get, the more beautiful everyone else becomes. O Death, the seductress! She will feel the sting in a feather— penned tattoo of a thin moon. Fight me, O Death I belong to combat. lust is a leprosy; we hold our wretched skin to the fire for some comfort in pain. There is worse than pain, dear one. caught in the mind's cobwebs where pain becomes a helper Come to me, lost soul, For I am the absence of truth, and I will hold you. The once true soul is my medicine, and health is transcendence. my tongue a runway for flies

every alternate week, her best friend would come to our house with a tupperware full of chicken spaghetti. they'd stick us in front of a tv with a stack of disney vhs tapes and go through each room, finding every dirty dish, and then spend the afternoon at the kitchen sink, washing each dish by hand while gossiping.

i think it's uncomfortable, but often necessary to recognize when we're watching a show or a film or reading a book or playing a video game with different expectations or desires than the story ever promised to fulfill. simply, you can't draw blood from a stone, you know? and I think this idea, however simple, is often very easy to forget when you're in fandom because fanworks are innately transformative. in fandom, we draw blood from stones all the time. we re-imagine characters, relationships, universes in whichever way we deem fit so that we can experience wish fulfillment. but as the fourth wall between fandom and the creatives behind media becomes thinner and thinner, the boundary between what is the job of storytellers (to tell a story), what is the job of the audience (to receive the story or opt out), and what is the job of fandom (to connect with one another over shared imaginative and transformative reception of the story being told) is getting muddied to detrimental effect. coupled with the rise of hyper-individualism and the increasing commodification of fanworks into traditionally published forms, this is where we get a real wave of entitlement from fandom -- this sense that the storyteller owes something to us by virtue of our fannish devotion and that perceived failure to meet our desires is worthy of a host of outrage and abuses. i think this is where paratext comes in and why the notion of what is or isn't canon feels perhaps more debatable now than ever before. i think it's born from a blend of hyper-individualism effecting how we think and behave as audience members, the increasing sense of entitlement that is borne out of such individualist thinking, the vanishing of the fourth wall between fandom and the mainstream as well as the creators of media that fandom enjoys, and a growing inability to accept the story you're being told on its own terms (and go happily and exclusively to fandom to remedy the urge for something more). because, really, what paratext offers is a sense of legitimacy -- usually when it conveniently upholds what you privately wanted in the first place. if the show you love isn't giving you enough to substantiate your ship, you can get your fix through an actor's interviews, their exposure to fanfiction and fan art, and their perceived approval of the ship. their opinion, by virtue of their literal proximity to the show, legitimizes your own. if the movie you love doesn't do enough with a character you find interesting, a scrapped plan for what the character might've done or a deleted scene might do the same. etc etc.